AI Communications - Volume 1, issue 3

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ISSN 0921-7126 (P)
ISSN 1875-8452 (E)

Impact Factor 2018: 0.461

AI Communications is a journal on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has a close relationship to ECCAI (the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence). It covers the whole AI community: scientific institutions as well as commercial and industrial companies.

AI Communications aims to enhance contacts and information exchange between AI researchers and developers, and to provide supranational information to those concerned with AI and advanced information processing. AI Communications publishes refereed articles concerning scientific and technical AI procedures, provided they are of sufficient interest to a large readership of both scientific and practical background. In addition it contains high-level background material, both at the technical level as well as the level of opinions, policies and news. The Editorial and Advisory Board is appointed by the Editor-in-Chief.

Abstract: Times are such that one of the most profound renewals in the history of American psychology and of psychology in general now comes from a scientist who was trained as a mathematician and became one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence, namely Marvin Minsky. The Society of Mind - the book in which he states his theory, in part the outcome of his collaboration with Seymour Papert - sharply departs from the all too simplistic psychologies that usually characterize work in A.I.; perhaps we have to go back to Freud's Outline of a Scientific Psychology to find a comparably ambitious…endeavour to describe mental functioning. In view of what seems to us to be its “paradigmatic” importance for psychology (in the Kuhnian sense), we shall try to clarify the part it may play in renewing psychology, and in turn to determine the possible contribution of genetic psychology to this new approach in A.I. Minsky's conception is more a research programme than a completed theory and it is set down in some two hundred arguments or propositions. Most are rather simple and obvious, some are more speculative in nature. We find ourselves at a crossroad where computer science, neuroscience and psychology converge in a series of arguments; each attempting to discover or describe one aspect or one process of the functioning of the mind. The project is quite clear: To set up a kind of artificial intelligence that would be fused into our knowledge of human intelligence. Consider a mechanical robot endowed, or paired with, a mechanical brain. What are the necessary components? How do they interact and co-operate so that the resulting global behaviour simulates human thought? Of course, such a project raises a number of philosophical and epistemological questions which the author doesn't evade. He gives clear cut and often original answers that, as we shall see, only need be cleared of a few elements inherited from a precybernetical mechanical materialism.
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Abstract: Artificial Intelligence has not only experienced a dramatic growth in West Germany, but also to a certain extent in the German Democratic Republic. Some research institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences of the GDR and VEB Robotron, have been working in the area of AI since as long ago as the early or mid-seventies. Many of their results are also known in the West, e.g. through the Automated Language Analysis congresses that are commonly held every two years. In the last few years, a great number of AI activities at other places have joined these “classic” research institutions. In…addition, a form of research on a GDR-wide basis has recently come to the fore. During a lecture tour to most of the relevant AI institutions, I had the opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-art of AI research in East Germany. The following report is certainly not exhaustive, but it covers the major current AI activities in this country. The details of individual research projects cannot be given, but the individual scientists to whom I refer will probably supply more information.
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